February 4, 1979

By DENIS DONOGHUE

he title of this volume is somewhat misleading. Crane's letters to Winters are available, but not Winters's to Crane. Crane probably destroyed them, enraged
by Winters's review of "The Bridge" in 1930; and even if they had survived that occasion, they could not be published, under the terms of Winters's will, until 1993. But Thomas Parkinson's book is extremely valuable.
Only one of Crane's letters to Winters is published in Brom Weber's "The Letters of Hart Crane 1916-1932" (1952). Nearly 50 are printed in Mr. Parkinson's book, with judiciously informative comment and elucidation.
We are also given a pretty clear indication of Winters's response to Crane's letters, sometimes by reading between Crane's lines, sometimes by reference to Winters's letters to Allen Tate.

Hart Crane (1899-1932) and Yvor Winters (1900-68) were associates rather than friends. The relationship was mutually useful rather than warm: During Christmas week, 1927, they had several conversations, but that was their only meeting, so we are not dealing
with the sort of warm and turbulent friendships that Crane had with Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, Slater Brown, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate and Kenneth Burke. The correspondence was hectic while it lasted. Between Oct. 25, 1926, and Dec.
10, 1928, Crane wrote more than 40 letters to Winters. Then there was a break for more than a year, until Jan. 14, 1930, when Crane sent Winters the final text of "The Bridge." After Winters reviewed the poem, Crane wrote him
a letter so rough, apparently, that Winters destroyed it. And that was the end. But the episode is a lively moment in American literary history, and is of great intrinsic interest. Crane was sufficiently stimulated or provoked by Winters
to mail him his views on sundry themes: notable the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Donne, literary form, Indian symbolism, science, Imagism, Whitman, Cummings, Joyce, Edmund Wilson, Hardy, Fielding, Hopkins, Eliot, Marlowe -- even
his recently discovered cure for hay fever.

The relationship began sweetly, with Winters praising Crane in letters to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine. When "White Buildings" was published in 1927, Winters not only agreed with Allen Tate's high assessment of it but listed
five poems from the volume that he felt placed Crane "among the five or six greatest poets writing in English." These poems -- "Repose of Rivers," "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," "Recitative"
and the second and fifth of the "Voyages" -- provided the criteria by which, in reviewing "The Bridge" three years later, Winters pronounced Crane a ruined man and a defeated poet. Crane was understandably desolate
when he read the review: understandably, because he had sent Winters several parts of "The Bridge" as soon as they were written, and he had no reason to anticipate that Winters would take such a dim view of the whole poem. In
the event, Winters maintained that Crane, on the evidence of "The Bridge," was a naive genius dazzled by Whitman, and therefore a lost soul. His poetry was now diffuse, loosely emotional, lenient toward its vices: Structurally
incoherent, "The Bridge" achieved the condition of true poetry only in single lines and phrases.

Winters never retracted or modified this judgment. He repeated it in 1947 when he wrote "The Significance of 'The Bridge' by Hart Crane or What Are We to Think of Professor X?" The only difference made by the lapse of
17 years was that instead of blaming Whitman for Crane's degeneration, Winters now blamed Emerson for both Whitman's mindlessness and Crane's suicide. "We have," he wrote, "a poet of great genius, who ruined
his life and his talent by living and writing as the two greatest teachers of our nation recommended." But there was even more to the story than that. Winters's own poetry was in question. In 1927 and 1928, the years of the main
correspondence with Crane, he was ridding himself of one style and taking on another. The esthetic of free verse that produced most of the poems in "The Immobile Wind" (1921), "The Magpie's Shadow" (1922) and "The
Bare Hills" (1927) struck Winters now as too fluid for his good. The change to a far more conceptual style was begun in the years between "The Bare Hills" and "The Proof" (1930). It was a change that could not
be willed; it required time, patience and determination.

Winters never confused Crane's style with his own, but he saw that there were vices common to both: a misunderstanding of the nature of imagery, a failure of discrimination. Crane was an important cause of the long war that Winters started
in 1928 against formlessness, fluidity, Romanticism, the asserted premise of feeling over judgment. I suspect Crane was the poet Winters had chiefly in mind when he wrote the "Statement of Purpose" for "Gyroscope" in
1929, attacking "all doctrines of liberation and emotional expansionism, since they deprecate and tend to eliminate the intellect, the core of conscious existence."

Again in 1929, Winters proclaimed the doctrine of good and evil that animated his criticism for the rest of his life. "The basis of Evil is in emotion," he declared, "and Good rests in the power of rational selection in action, as a preliminary
to which the emotion in any situation must be as far as possible eliminated, and, in so far as it cannot be eliminated, understood." The function of poetry was to understand emotion, as a second best to eliminating it: Only a besotted
Whitmanian would cultivate emotion as a good in itself. Stylistic precision, Winters maintained, "is merely the ultimate manifestation of spiritual precision and strength." The way to achieve this precision, this strength, was
by studying the masters: in Renaissance poetry, Ben Jonson, Fulke Greville, George Herbert; in the modern poets, Baudelaire, Valery, Hardy, Bridges, a few poems by Wallace Stevens.

In the years of his correspondence with Crane, Winters was setting his mind upon a monastic discipline, practicing the fierce schedules of a recent convert. His new poems were not quite as stern as his critical imperatives, they were content to achieve
a state of poise between Wilderness and Wisdom. Wilderness was allowed to instigate experience, provided Wisdom was at hand to curb it. The object was certitude, known by the finality of its tone. So the correspondence with Crane had to
end, for many reasons. Mr. Parkinson allows us to guess that Winters offered Crane some heavy-handed advice about alcohol and homosexuality. I can well believe it. Both men were despots, in their different ways. Winters was a despot of
order, knowledge, concept, restraint. Crane's despotism luxuriated in passion, instinct, genius. Winters believed that he could keep evil at bay only be sentencing himself to the hard labor of knowledge, and by the rational imitation
of his peers. Crane seems to have believed that daily life enforced a sufficient degree of penance and that a man had the right to make the best of it, taking his pleasures where he found them. He does not appear to have felt guilt, unless
it took the form of dissatisfaction with his poetry. In the end, I don't think Winters had any real influence on Crane; they veered too far from each other too soon. Crane remained for Winters a cautionary instance, a text from some
terrible Old Testament of his own devising. Still, I keep thinking of one moment in the relationship between them: Winters's review of "The Bridge." If Winters had been more equably settled in his convictions when he read
it, he would have avoided reviewing it, made up an excuse. A lesser man would have dodged the occasion. Of course that would only have postponed the breach; it was inevitable. Winters could not have listened to Crane's Orphic voice
much longer; nor could Crane have borne Winters's righteousness.